FILE: An exterior view of a Trader Joe's grocery store.
Luke Sharrett/NYTIt’s no secret that Trader Joe’s employees are friendly. You’ve probably experienced it yourself: an employee asking about your plans for the day, complimenting the frozen Mandarin orange chicken in your cart or even surprising you with a bouquet of flowers on your birthday.
After a particularly congenial bit of banter with a cutie in a Hawaiian shirt, maybe you’ve found yourself wondering, “Is this Trader Joe’s employee flirting with me?”
If you’ve ever thought this, you’re not alone. In fact, there’s a pervasive rumor on social media that Trader Joe’s employees are actually trained to flirt with customers.
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In one TikTok video with more than 300,000 likes, social media star Daniel Bennett asks a person off-screen who identifies as a Trader Joe’s employee if he flirts with his customers.
“Yeah, if they’re hot,” the person replies. “Usually whatever they’re getting, I’ll just tell them that’s my favorite.”
FILE: An interior view of a Trader Joe's grocery store.
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And it’s not a new thing. A headline from satire website Reductress from 2018 reads, “Is He Flirting with You or Does He Just Work at Trader Joe’s?” In a 2020 YouTube video with more than 9 million views, popular internet personality Emma Chamberlain brought up the urban legend, asking, “I’ve been seeing this thing on TikTok talking about how the cashiers at Trader Joe’s are like trained to flirt with you. Is this true?”
A Slate article published this past June took things even further, claiming that Trader Joe’s employees are not only flirty, but that they’re all sleeping with each other.
Earlier this month, the rumor mill reached such a fever pitch that the CEO of Trader Joe’s himself addressed it. When asked on an episode of the company’s podcast whether the company train its employees to flirt, CEO Bryan Palbaum replied, “Definitively, no.”
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“I think we just have such a unique environment in our stores that, to go into a Trader Joe’s store and feel that everyone is genuinely interested in whether or not you are having a good day, compared to maybe perhaps other retailers, I could see how that might be misinterpreted,” he said.
In the same episode, Trader Joe’s president and vice CEO Jon Basalone added, “That’s just what niceness feels like.”
Shayne Jones, a San Francisco Trader Joe’s employee, confirmed to SFGATE that what the CEO said was true — flirting is definitely not in the employee handbook. She hypothesized that people probably get that impression based on how outgoing all the employees are.
“They tend to hire pretty effervescent people,” she said. “… And that said, flirting is not illegal. Like I would flirt if I could, but honestly if they trained me to flirt I’d probably be pulling more people than I am now.”
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FILE: Customers walk to a Trader Joe's market.
Charles Krupa/APIn 2021, Glamour asked eight current and former Trader Joe’s employees whether they were trained to flirt. The resounding answer? No. However, one employee did say that she was encouraged to occasionally give away flower bouquets or candy bars to customers to brighten their days.
“While I don’t really think you can train people to flirt or be nice, we do like to hire nice people,” Kenya Friend-Daniel, the national director of public relations for Trader Joe’s, told Glamour.
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It’s worth noting that the flirting rumor really blossomed in the COVID-19 isolation days of 2020. During this period, many people were so starved for human interaction that it makes sense that they might have interpreted the Trader Joe’s cashier praising the “Everything But the Bagel” seasoning in their cart as a come-on.
“I feel like after COVID, I think that everybody was kind of like, ‘Wow, how do we socialize?’” said Jones. “Like, what does this social cue mean?”
But that’s not to say that no Trader Joe’s employee has ever flirted. As Jones said, it’s not illegal.
“I’ll say this: They really do encourage us to be ourselves and like, you know, have genuine interactions with people,” she said. “So good conversations … who knows? They can lead other places.”
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